Harmless (21 page)

Joseph glanced at the door hoping to see someone, anyone, who’d confirm that he was discussing revenge films with a man who wanted to kill him. He closed his eyes and opened them, hoping beyond reason to see Franny appear. Where was she? Why were they wasting time in this place?

He took a deep breath and started exploring the shack again. If life had taught him anything, it was to play along until he caught up.

The old laptop lay beside the screen. He used Julian’s
knife to pop the letters from the keyboard like corn kernels. The big screen cracked with a single kick. That poor girl. He kicked the screen again and then threw the computer across the room with his good arm, hitting the far wall. If any man tried to hurt Franny he’d gouge his eyes out and then cut off his balls and shove them down his throat until he choked to death on them.

Alex stood there, slyly smiling. He was rejuvenated, lifted high above the night’s crisis by Joseph’s violent rampage. There was more where that came from. Joseph tipped over the big screen and brought his full weight down on it, nearly re-twisting his ankle, then he kicked a hole in the drywall with his good foot. There were a couple of large cans of barbeque fluid and a hibachi under the table. Joseph splashed the lighter fluid on the
DVDS
and over the table, onto the wall and the futon.

“People will see the fire for miles,” he said. “Cops, firefighters—the more the merrier.”

Alex nodded—
set the whole fucking forest on fire
, his smiling face said. Joseph splashed more barbeque fluid on the back wall and window frame, careful not to soak his sleeves, then emptied the can on the chipboard floor.

“I need a match,” he said.

When he turned around Alex was standing in the doorway, holding a pack of matches in one hand and an unlit match in the other. Another can of barbeque fluid lay near his feet, the nozzle leaking the last of its contents in a puddle that was spreading toward Joseph.

So that’s how it would end. Twenty feet of floor separated Joseph from the door. He’d be a human fireball by the
time he hit the open air, if Alex didn’t slam the door on his face first. Alex would tell the cops that Joseph went nuts in the shack, doused the place in barbeque fluid, then lit the match too early. Joseph closed his eyes and locked in on an image of Franny, the one good thing he’d brought into this world. He remembered when they took the ferry to Vancouver Island. She was six, and she’d never been on a boat that held more than twenty people before, and when the ocean-going ferry loomed up to the dock her eyes filled with awe. “It’s a
ship
! Daddy, it’s a ship!” she shouted, her voice coming to him from a finer world, her eyes free of the doubt and self-consciousness that clouded them now.

I love you
—that’s what he’d tell her if she was here.
Never forget that
.

“Are you coming?”

When he opened his eyes, Alex was regarding him with mild annoyance, his nose scrunching against the gas fumes.

He wasn’t going to kill him here.

Was the asshole going to run Joseph through a series of agonized Last Moments before finally finishing him off? Joseph put the knife back in his pocket, but not in the case. He wanted to keep the weapon handy. He was going to get out of this alive and find Franny.

He ran through the doorway, propelled by a rush of hope that felt like the first stage of madness, so elated that, as Alex lit the match, he shouted, “Goodbye Twenty-First-Century Cocks Studios!” The cornball joke seemed to trigger a loud
whoosh
, and a hot wind hit their backs before they reached the trees. Glass shattered, and they turned to see funnels of fire whirling up from the front door, carrying
the glowing fragments of particleboard and plastic into the black sky.

“Burn you fucker!” Joseph shouted, the blood roaring right out to his fingertips, threatening to burst them like overripe fruit. The stars were gone, the trees bright and shadowless, the burning shack pushing back the encasing night. The men watched the flames, the orange light softening Alex’s face—he could have been a child mesmerized by the old magic of fire. The blaze licked its way up the shack’s outer walls, flames scrambling over each other to meet above the roof and join the funnelling cone, a beacon for the cops and a warning to Franny’s captors that Joseph would scorch the dark places of the world to find her.

“We better go,” Alex said at last, making a half-hearted attempt at the Leader of Men voice he’d used on the logging road. Had it sounded so rehearsed then? Joseph would have been desperate enough to believe even the poorest performance if it meant saving Franny.

“We just burned down the little fuckers’ shack,” Alex said. “They’ll jump us if we go down that side of the hill.” He pointed to the path, conspicuous now in the firelight. “If we go down this side, we should reach another path. It’ll take us just north of the commune.”

Another change in plans.

“We need to hurry.” Alex stepped into the woods, leaving Joseph alone.

Alex was right, but why the sudden concern for their pace?

The adrenaline was draining from Joseph’s system, the first signs of a monstrous hangover intensifying the pain and dizzying pressure in his head. Sentences seemed to lose
their glue, scattering their words, and he felt himself sliding between narratives, each as compelling as the last while it reigned. In one, Joseph followed Alex to the old commune, where they took out the war vets and rescued Franny and Rebecca. In another, Alex led Joseph to a more suitable site to kill him. A third had the men fighting to the death.

Joseph touched the knife in his pocket, feeling the serrated edge. He tried to imagine stabbing Alex’s belly until he was dead, a sequence of actions he couldn’t complete because he’d be lost without Alex. People died out here, driven mad by bugs, missing the search party or the hunter’s shack by a hundred yards. He needed Alex to lead him out, and more.
It never changes
, Joseph thought,
in the schoolyard or the old-age home, the willingness to hand fate over to a bigger, stronger male
.

He felt sleepy and passive, captive to the fire as it ravaged the shack, the flames burning yellow and orange and blue, leaping out to touch the edge of the forest. A forest fire—that would get the police and firefighters out here, maybe force the vets into the open. He should have set the forest on fire hours ago. He turned and walked into the woods after Alex.

T
he wilderness gradually assumed its own presence, trapping the two men inside a distinct atmosphere, as if they were piloting a bathysphere floating through a deep ocean trench, their feeble flashlight cutting a tiny wedge out of the blackness. They were safe inside their cramped craft, but if the light failed, the wilderness would pour in like tons of frigid water. Shapes moved into the light and merged back into the darkness, the evergreens bustling like pods of kelp, occasionally revealing a pair of pupils reflecting the light back like marbles.

Alex moved at a methodical, energetic pace, with Joseph trudging a little behind, wrestling with the facts as he understood them, his mind picking through the same open-ended conclusions and speculations. Alex had aimed the rifle at him, intending to pull the trigger, then didn’t go through with it. An incriminating detail might have stopped him, a clue the
CSI
nerds would pick up on later. Then there were the kids—four local boys who’d testify to hearing a second shot only
after
they’d reached the bottom of the hill.
Was it Murder One—the charge, not the crime—that had stayed Alex’s hand? Or maybe Joseph’s reckless attack on the boys had saved him. Aiming the rifle at Joseph’s back, Alex might have thought:
Here is another man, morally outraged enough to fire on four boys who filmed the gang rape of teenage girl
. How could he shoot a man who’d so blatantly demonstrated his moral worth? Whatever the case, Alex walked down the narrow deer path like a man unburdened of a crushing load.

Look at him
, Joseph thought, watching his broad back,
like he’s on a recreational hike
.

Stab the fucker in the back
, a voice urged.
Stick in the knife before he finds another place to kill you
.

Joseph touched the knife, wondering what it would feel like to kill a man. Could he do it if he had to?

It’s him or you
.

Not yet it wasn’t. He still needed Alex.

They finally reached flat ground again, the smell of pine resin saturating the damp air. Alex stopped to check the compass, clearly not in a hurry, then stepped to his right, pushing the branches aside so they didn’t swing back in Joseph’s face.

What a guy
.

He was close enough to kill. It would be so easy.

“I found it,” Alex said.

They were standing on a path, narrower than the big path but still wide enough for them to walk side by side.

“This will take us a little west of the commune.”

Joseph was sure he’d said “north” when they’d left the shack. For God’s sake, he’d better start paying attention if he wanted to stay alive.

“How’s your ankle?” Alex said as they started down the path.

“It’s holding up.” He hadn’t noticed he was limping.

“Good. We’ve got a ways to go.”

To where?
Joseph chewed the inside of his cheek to keep the words in. He felt apprehensive, alert and confused, but he didn’t sense any immediate danger.

“Those boys will think twice about playing at porn kings again,” Alex said.

“It was pure adrenaline.” Joseph was too exhausted to play up the machismo of his earlier actions. “I could have just as easily run away.”

“Your body knew what it was doing. It took action.”

“The name of action,” Joseph said, finding the phrase again.

“Hamlet.”

“What?”

“
The name of action
—it’s from
Hamlet
. I memorized that soliloquy in high school.”

Of course he had.

“You fired that gun because your body said
enough
! You couldn’t just sit back and take it anymore,” Alex insisted. “It wasn’t enough to comment or make a joke or send an angry email. You know what I mean.”

In a general sense, Joseph did. Life had heaped a lot of shit on him—clean-scented, cost-analyzed, and justified from on high. And the more of it he ate, the leaner and broker and more debt-ridden he got—like everyone else he knew. But what did that have to do with tonight?

“How long until we reach the commune?”

“Can’t be more than three miles.”

“And the veterans live there?”

Alex waited to answer. “Some are vets, yeah.”

Why did he pause? “Which war did they fight in?”

“The guys who started the place in the sixties are still around.”

They would be Nam vets, nearing retirement age, still strong enough to overpower two girls but too old to drag them back to the commune. And if they’d been abducting local girls for forty years, wouldn’t the police have caught them by now? Iraq or Gulf War vets were more likely culprits. God only knew what they’d seen over there, the kills notched on body-shredding rifles, their minds scrambled by experimental inoculation shots and uranium-spiked bullets.

“That guy in khaki, standing by the woods,” Joseph said. “How old was he?”

“Hard to say. He was pretty far away.”

Joseph had him! Alex had mentioned the vet’s troubled expression earlier, now he couldn’t guess the guy’s age. But why lie? Was he so desperate to get Joseph, a risk-adverse city boy, onside for a dangerous nighttime search that he’d invented the crazed vet?

No—it had been Joseph’s plan to search the woods. He glanced at Alex, who was already looking his way. His expression, lit by the flashlight below, was provocative, challenging, as though he wanted Joseph to know something. And did he? Had he been fucking with Joseph all night? Joseph had to keep him talking.

“Why did you join the army? You never told me.”

Alex was ready with an answer. “I wanted to be part of something bigger than me. Not very fashionable.”

“Understatement of the first order.”

“Everyone I knew was trying to
find themselves
,” he said, easing into memory. “I wanted to lose myself, or find a better self. I probably read too many explorers’ biographies. Shackleton, Scott, Livingstone, men from the Great Age of Exploration—men who sacrificed everything for an ideal or a test of will. Since I didn’t know any men of destiny, I thought I might find that spirit in the army. I used to lie in my bedroom and imagine what it would be like to be a unit in a single organism working toward the betterment of humanity.”

“You wanted to be a limb.” In spite of everything, Joseph felt protective of Alex’s wounded faith in human progress, an idealism their hip friends used to laugh at as if it was an affectation, like a taste for obscure jazz records.

“I was sick of myself,” Alex said. “Sick of hanging around the plaza and going to parties. I wanted to join a community that would force me to go beyond my boundaries. I didn’t want people to
ask
what I was into, I wanted them to
show
me.” He groaned. “I’d seen too many movies and read too many books—it always comes down to that.”

“I didn’t want to surrender my precious identity to any ideal at that age,” Joseph admitted. The only earthly limitations he pushed against were erotic. Sex was his Great Western Sea—sex and the priestesses who guarded its mysteries.

“I don’t know,” Alex said. “I think you were always a closet idealist. You wouldn’t have put it this way, but what you really wanted was a
cause
.”

Why not just admit it: there was a time, after Franny was born, when Joseph would have been lost without Alex’s idealism, his mentorship of the man Joseph wanted to be—husband, father, engaged citizen, and writer. Martha wasn’t enough for Joseph, and neither was Franny. He remembered her as a three-year-old, skinny limbs and big eyes, climbing up his arm like a spider monkey to latch onto his waist, looking up at him with total trust, as if he was a god with no dominion but her child’s world. She’d been easy to care for. She needed food, shelter, stories, and strong arms, a supportive tone and a few pet names—
Honey, Puppy, Fan
. And then. And then. In crept the old doubts, the old vanities, the boredom and yearning for new sensations. Had he really let himself believe that Franny would be better off without him?